Fidel’s dismal science

CUBANS this week have endured a barrage of local press coverage of an international conference in Havana on “Globalisation and Development”. If they read the Communist Party's daily paper, Granma, they have long appreciated that the market—“a mad, savage beast lacking control or regulation”—could “through liberalisation (and) globalisation destroy the planet's economy overnight.” But is there any remedy short of socialist enlightenment?

Nearly 600 delegates from 50 countries, mostly in the developing world and especially from Latin America, gathered to discuss the topic. True, many invitees were otherwise engaged: George Soros, financier and philanthropist; Milton Friedman and J.K. Galbraith, American economists; Tony Benn, a left-wing British politician; even The Economist.

For the conference, President Fidel Castro shunned his usual army fatigues for a business suit. Has the president, who could barely restrain his glee when Asian markets collapsed like communist dominoes, had a change of heart? Hardly. Rather, fear that Brazil might be the next domino, bringing its neighbours down with it, prompted the effort to get to know the enemy.

For the perplexed of Havana, struggling to understand the government's thinking, help is at hand in the form of a leaflet on globalisation issued to leaders of the country's “Committees for the Defence of the Revolution”. Sadly, the glossary of terms—“Adam Smith”,“Dow Jones”, “Systemic Risk”, and so on—is better than the text, which is no more enlightening than Granma's habitual diatribes about the failure of capitalism. It would have been better had the writers used examples that any Cuban could have grasped.

In fact, this would have been rather easy. Financial speculation? Currency markets? No mystery to Cubans, long used to juggling three currencies with fluctuating values, legal and illegal. The lengthy exposition of the theories of Adam Smith could have been skipped—any of Havana's 10,000 prostitutes could explain the rules of supply and demand. What about “disintermediation”? The leaflet ponderously defines it as “operating directly without passing through financial or banking intermediaries”. A more succinct translation might be “the Cuban way of life”.